Irish media anti-US, claims retired diplomat
George Dempsey, who headed the embassy's political section for four years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, also attacked Irish foreign policy at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, claiming Ireland was the only country in the civilised world which did not support the coalition.
Mr Dempsey, who still lives in Dublin and has been a persistent critic of what he claims is the anti-US attitude of some Irish people, launched his attack in his soon-to-be-published memoirs.
He writes: "Let us be clear about this. The Irish media, in general, bear their share of the responsibility for what happened in the United States.
"For far too long in this country there has been a prevailing view, which denigrates and condemns and even vilifies American foreign policy.
"Many of these venomous falsehoods such as claims that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed in the Gulf war have continued to spill out over Irish airwaves this last week.
"The hatred of America, which drove the suicidal terrorists, doesn't flourish in a global vacuum."
He claimed that Irish columnists appeared to blame the US itself for the terrorist attacks rather than Osama bin Laden's Islamist network.
Mr Dempsey singles out the Irish Times and RTÉ, accusing some within the organisations of "witless pandering to Arab irrationality and intransigence".
He said the Irish media is dominated by an "invasion of the body snatchers from a planet peopled by time-warped 1960s radicals and Marxist revisionist historians" and claimed there was a constant use of anti-American journalists and commentators.
On the 1991 Gulf War, Mr Dempsey said Ireland was the only country in the civilised world which did not support the coalition following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
But he added that US military transports were allowed to use Shannon as a transit point.
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